ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the pain and anger as it is narrated by three sets of white working-class boys and men in high school, in college, at their white working-class, public sector jobs and in the community. It focuses on involves an ethnographic investigation conducted by Lois Weis in the mid-1980s. The chapter is a study of working-class high school students in a de-industrializing area called "Freeway". While there are several facets to the production of the boys' identity, it focuses on the ways in which young white males co-produce African American male identities and their own identities. The chapter offers three scenes in which white males, poor and working class, are constructing identities on the backs of people of color, white women and gays. White hetero-masculinity, for the working class in the United States, may indeed be endangered.
